2

They passed an awful lot of dead people on their way to the office.  It was really kinda creepy.

Also unnerving, as there were people walking about who, much like the guy in the paper gown with the sutures in his head, were obviously physically dead, yet still up and about anyway. They weren't zombies, though - Logan hadn't seen them attack anyone. But then again, he remembered how it was down in Santo Marco, with the dead reanimated and held in check by those demi-gods, and he wondered if they'd found a way back to Earth. Why would they come to L.A.?  Revenge against Bob?  Didn't they know he was off on vacation?

When they got to the office, it seemed fairly full. Bren was behind his desk, talking to someone on the phone, and Kier was with him, checking out something on the computer. Naomi and Xander were sitting on the sofa, drinking coffee, and as soon as they came in, Xander carped, "Oh holy crap, it's Freddy Krueger."

"That bastard was a copycat," Marc replied. "Logan had the claws first."

Matt was introduced to everyone, and then Giles stuck his head out of Angel's office, looking a bit surprised. "Good, you're here," he said, barely acknowledging Matt in any respect. "Can you contact Bob?"

Logan had a feeling this was coming. "No. When he went off to do that favor for his ex-wife, he took his energy with him. Believe me, after Je - I've tried to contact him. Either he's too far away or he's cut off or something. I've been unable to get through."

"What's this about?" Matt whispered to Marc.

"You don't think something's happened to him, do you?" Naomi asked, alarmed. Still hung up on him, was she? Logan knew he shouldn't feel a sting of jealousy, but he still did.

It was Giles that shook his head. "Once you're an avatar, you're generally an avatar for life. Even if Bob was killed in another dimension, his energy would manifest in Logan."

"Oh," Naomi said, and looked uncertain. "That's good to know ... I guess."

How did she think he felt about it?

Angel wasn't here yet, but was on his way. Logan mentioned the problem he and Marc had encountered down in Santo Marco with animated dead people, and how Bob had essentially come along and fixed the problem - supposedly. Giles considered that a moment, and shook his head. "Even if they could escape again, if someone was stupid enough to break the super seals Bob put in place, they'd be physically bound to Santo Marco until they could take over enough people to escape their bounds. That would take a while. Also, I don't think they had anything to do with disembodied spirits."

"Could we be dealing with a death god who does?" Logan asked.

Giles grimaced, looking away briefly. He didn't want to say it. "It's a very good possibility. In fact, it could be little else, unless the barrier between this world and the dimension of the dead has ruptured."

Sid leaned against the wall beside the bookcase, taking on his usual posture of silent observation. As he liked to say, he was a man of action, not words. Logan sat down on the end of the couch with a sarcastic smirk. "Hell is full and the dead are walking the earth."

"Please, no Night of the Living Dead references now," Kier asked. "People are freaking out enough as it is."

"No, they're not," Marc pointed out. "In fact, why is that? There's all sorts of ghosts and animated corpses out there, and almost no one has noticed."

Giles did something he rarely did - he shrugged. "People often ignore what they can't understand or don't want to see. That's why most people exist in this world blissfully ignorant of the supernatural."

"You guys are serious, aren't you?" Matt asked, and he seemed genuinely stunned. "Holy shit."

"So what's your power, new boy?" Xander asked, giving him a harsh look. Maybe he didn't have any powers to speak of, but he'd been aware of the supernatural long enough to be impatient with the newbies.

Matt made a dismissive gesture and wandered towards the window, which was blocked off with heavy blinds. "I can control water."

"Water?" Xander repeated in disbelief, then snickered. "So you're Aquaman?"

"Hey," Naomi said, giving him a backhand smack on the arm. She was wearing gloves, so he didn't get shocked, but he recoiled slightly anyways. "Knock it off. I have power over electricity, and you never made fun of me."

"Yeah, but that's 'cause that shit's cool. Water is just ... well, that's lame."

Marc suddenly towered over him. "Are my powers lame?"

Xander seemed to understand now that he was treading on very dangerous ground. "Not at all; yours are really cool. I wish I could paralyze people by touching them. Especially in line at the ATM."

Marc gave him a warning scowl, then sat down on the couch beside him, really upping the discomfort ante.

Matt opened a blind slat and looked out at the street, and Kier cursed and jumped back into the shadows as Bren bolted to his feet and ripped Matt away from the window. "Don't do that!"

Matt looked stunned. "What? Why?"

"Because I'm a fucking vampire, you moron!" Kier snapped. He didn't appear burnt, but it was a very near thing - only his supernatural reflexes had saved him. “I can’t be in direct sunlight!”

Matt stared at him for a long time. "Goddamn it, you're serious, aren't you?"

This was really not the time for a newbie. How were they supposed to break someone in with all this shit going on?

Matt looked around the room, and asked, “Are any of you vampires too?”

“Just Angel,” Xander replied helpfully.

“I’m just a demon,” Bren said, looking at his computer.

Matt stared extra hard at the back of his head. “Demon?”

“Hon, we’ve been over this,” Marc said, a small edge of irritation in his voice.

“Yeah, but I had no idea that you were being serious.”

Xander sighed dramatically and rolled his eyes. “The supernatural exists - get used to it. Can we move on now?”

“That would be lovely,” Giles admitted, pulling a very old looking book off the shelves in the front office.

The door opened, and Angel paused, looking around the extremely full office. “Logan - I didn’t realize you were back in town. Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Hi Marcus.”

“Hey tall, dark, and toothsome. How’s it hanging?”

“Upside down from the ceiling,” Xander interjected, smiling at his own joke. Angel and Marc both gave him evil stares, and his smile wilted under the scrutiny. “What, don’t you guys have a sense of humor?”

Angel’s look took on a weary aspect as he shook his head dismissively, and he decided just to ignore Xander. Logan figured he did that a lot. “Any ideas, Giles?”

“Nothing concrete. But I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities.” Giles shoved his glasses up on his forehead and rubbed his eyes. “We’re dealing with a death god, a complete dimensional collapse, or a very powerful necromancer.”

“Necrophiliac?” Xander repeated dubiously.

Giles shot him a harsh glare, like he’d malapropped on purpose. It was possible he had. “Necromancer.”

Bren, who had sat back down at his desk after shooing Matt away, asked, “Isn’t that just another term for a warlock?”

Giles grimaced, like the thought pained him. “People do sometimes use the terms interchangeably, but it’s incorrect. A true necromancer doesn’t really know any other spells - they specialize in conversing with and raising the dead, as well as conjuring souls from the ether.”

“I see dead people,” Xander said, in a strange voice. Naomi smacked him on the arm again, and Logan was only sorry she didn’t punch him in the head.

“But that’s black magic, isn’t it?” Angel asked, looking troubled.

Giles shook his head slightly. “It can be. It depends on the necromancer.”

Matt sat down on the other side of Marc, looking slightly lost, but Marc patted his knee, and that seemed to temporarily placate him. At least he kept his mouth shut.

Angel shrugged with his hands, letting them fall at his sides. “So we track down the necromancer. That should be simple.”

“You’d think,” Giles said, in a way that suggested he wasn’t convinced.

It probably wasn’t as easy as that - was it ever?

They discussed possible spells to track down the necromancer - if it was indeed a necromancer - when someone walked in through the door. Literally; they just walked through the closed door.

“Oh thank god,” Wesley said. “The first time I walked into a dentist’s office.”

For a long moment, everyone just stared at the ghost Wesley, Angel especially. Wesley stared back, aware how awkward this was, but he also realized how many people there were in the room that he didn’t know . He looked to be the exact same age as when he died, in a leather jacket, dark pants and an equally shirt, although Logan couldn‘t help but notice there was a hole in his shirt, darker at the edges with blood. “Giles,” he finally said. “Xander. What is this, a Sunnydale reunion?”

“You’ve been brought back,” Logan said. It was a stupidly obvious thing to say, but he only said it because someone had to say something.

Wesley half shrugged, dipping his head towards his shoulder. “Apparently. I can’t tell you how odd this is.”

“We’re right there with you,” Angel finally said, looking supremely pained and guilty. “So, um, how have you been?”

“Dead.” Angel winced at the reply, and that must have come out harsher than he intended, because Wes quickly added, “Although that’s more or less something you realize in retrospect. Some of them out there are aware they’re not supposed to be here, though.”

“Have you talked to them?” Giles asked curiously.

Wes nodded. “I was trying to figure out what was going on. What I discovered has left me more confused. Everybody who’s reanimated has the wrong body.”

Matt leaned over to Marc and whispered, “Is he really a dead guy?”

“What do you mean?” Giles asked Wes.

“I mean that I heard a reanimated woman complaining that she was Julio Ramirez, a seventeen year old Latino, not an elderly Asian woman, although his body was that of an aged Japanese female. I thought it might have been some sort of disorientation from sudden resurrection, but I talked to every reanimated corpse I came across, and everyone claimed to be in the wrong body: wrong gender, wrong race, wrong age, sometimes wrong location - I ran into a woman who claimed to be from Notting Hill. If she wasn’t, she had studied the accent.”

Giles and Wes shared the same worried look. Logan guessed that this was bad.

“How can that be?” Kier asked. He was back standing behind Bren. “What the fuck is going on here?”

Wes shot him a suspicious glance. “And you are?”

“Kier, Bren’s boyfriend. I’m a vampire, but a good one. Kinda. You’re Wesley, right? The ex-Watcher who got … umm, yeah, gonna shut up here. Nice to meet you.”

Wesley raised an eyebrow at him - it was probably the vampire comment - but he thanked him all the same.

“People who touched the supernatural in some way might be the easiest for a necromancer to access,” Giles pointed out.

“Touched?” Marc replied. “You mean as in killed by?” He shot a glance at Wes. “No offense.”

“None taken. And while killed by the supernatural would definitely fall in the touched category, it’s only part of it. Touched would mean anyone who’s had a brush with the supernatural, whether they were aware of it or not, and didn’t have a soul beholden to or claimed by any god or demon.”

“Absolutely any contact with the supernatural?” Bren repeated. “Holy shit, it’s gonna look like Times Square on New Year’s Eve out there.”

Angel nodded in grim agreement. “That’s why we need to work fast. Giles, that locator spell.”

He nodded, and gave Wes a hesitant glance. “Would you like to help?”

“It’s why I’m here,” the dead man replied sincerely.

The two ex-Watchers went back into the inner offices, Wesley following Giles but walking through the wall anyways, and Angel looked like he wanted to follow, but didn’t. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against Bren’s desk, staring at the floor.

“Awkward much?” Xander said.

“Does this mean everyone we know who’s been killed is coming back?” Logan wondered, addressing the question at Angel. Meaning of course Cordelia and Gunn specifically, but possibly some of the baddies they’d put down as well.

Angel met his eyes, and seemed to understand what he was asking. “Doyle and Cordy were both beholden to the Powers That Be, so we won’t see them. Although Lila came back and she’s beholden to the Senior Partners, so maybe it’s possible.”

“Lila?” Logan repeated. “The uber-bitch?”

“Yeah. She’s back at my apartment.” At his odd look, he elaborated. “She’s afraid the Senior Partners will be mad at her for manifesting even though they didn’t arrange it. She’s hiding out.”

“How do we know they didn’t arrange it?” Logan countered. The question hung in the air, and they all exchanged quizzical glances. It was a possibility to add to the pile.

After Angel explained to everyone who Lila was, since some of the people here didn’t know, Wes walked through the closed office door, making Xander jump. “Would you stop doing that?” he snapped.

Wes just gave him a sidelong glance, suggesting he thought about saying something sarcastic and cutting, but decided against it. “The locator spell isn’t working,” he reported. “It just indicates the entire city of Los Angeles.”

“Which means what exactly?” Logan asked first.

Wes shrugged, grimacing at having no concrete answers. “It means we’re being blocked, or there’s no person to find who’s doing this.”

Xander scoffed. “Well somebody’s obviously doing it. I’ve never heard of a natural dead people clog.”

Wes shot him a harsh look. “Somebody’s doing it, yes, but maybe not a person.”

“A demon?” Naomi guessed.

“A god,” Logan groaned, rubbing his eyes. Oh, he so didn’t want to have to deal with another god again.

“What we have to figure out is why someone would do this; it’ll be easier to track down the perpetrator then,” Marc said, trying out some investigative logic. “Why would someone do this? What does this cause? What’s the gain?”

Angel was the first to take a stab at an answer. “Chaos. It causes chaos, and frees up a lot of dead people to walk the Earth. But I’m not sure there’s anything to gain besides mass confusion.”

“Perhaps when the second phase kicks in,” Wes said, looking thoughtful and troubled.

Angel finally looked at Wes full on, which was something he’d been nervously avoiding since he’d come in. His eyes lingered over the bloody hole in his shirt, but eventually scudded up to his face. “What do you mean the second phase?”

Wes looked reluctant to tell them all, but he did. “So far all the animated corpses I’ve encountered or seen are the freshly dead, those in good shape. What happens when whoever’s doing this starts resurrecting more decayed corpses?”

“Oh yuck,” Bren commented.

“It’ll be zombie stomping time, is that what you’re saying?” Xander replied. “’Cause I’m down for that. Hell, I’ll go home and get my chainsaw now.”

Wes scowled at him. “Hardly. How do you think you’d feel if you suddenly found yourself alive again, not only in the wrong body, but in a body where bits of it are falling off?”

“Double yuck,” Bren said, shuddering.

“Again, I’m thinking it’s zombie time,” Xander commented.

Angel frowned at him this time. “They’ll be traumatized, to say the least.”

Wes nodded. “And probably angry. But what that will ultimately add up to beyond emotionally traumatizing a large number of dead people, I’m not sure.” He scratched his head - a weird thing for a ghost to do - and asked, “Where the hell is Bob? We could use him right now.”

“He’s off helping his ex-wife with something in another dimension,” Logan told him. “I can’t seem to get a hold of him.”

“Really? How rude of him. You’d think he’d leave his avatar a phone number or something.”

“Tell me about it,” Logan agreed. “But I’m not totally out of options. He might not be talkin’ to me, but I find it hard to believe he’s totally icing Helga out.” He dug out his cell phone, and since he had the Way Station on speed dial, he just hit a button and waited for the call to go through. It rang three times before someone answered with a clipped, “What the fuck do you want?”

From that wonderfully warm and profane greeting, he knew it was Lia. “I need to talk to -” He didn’t even get that far - he heard a clunk, and then the drone of a dial tone. Why couldn’t it have been Lau’s shift today?

Angel gave him a tight, queasy smile. “It was Lia, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. She’s a fucking ray of sunshine, isn’t she?” Logan dropped the phone back in his coat pocket, and headed towards the door. “I’ll just go pay a visit. It ain’t far from here, and I can bring Helga back. It’s a bit of a sausage fest in here anyways.” That made Naomi laugh at least.

“I can come with you, bud,” Marc said.

Matt grabbed Marc’s shoulder, and looked stricken by the thought. “Oh please no.”

Logan shook his head. “It’s okay. I won’t be long, and I can handle myself if things turn ugly.”

Marc looked uncertain about that, but then Wes stepped forward and said, “I’ll come with you. I wanted to have another look around anyways, see if there was something I missed.”

He didn’t know why, but Logan had a sense that Wesley wanted to talk to him about something, and going with him was the only way to do it in private. Logan shrugged, and grabbed the doorknob. “Sure, yeah. C’mon. We’ll be back in a few minutes.” Before there were any more protests, volunteers, or questions, he left, and just assumed Wes was following him.

He was right, just as he was right about Wes wanting to talk to him. He wanted to know what had been going on since he died, and how long ago that had been (he had no idea; apparently once you were dead, time ceased to exist, which made sense). Logan tried to be as succinct as possible since there was a lot to talk about, and it took up most of the walk to the Way Station. But in direct sunlight, all the ghosts looked more translucent, Wesley included, and it was a little freaky. It was equally freaky that so many other people on the street didn’t seem to notice the ghost army surrounding them. In fact, some asshole talking on his cell phone walked right through Wes without stopping. “Watch where yer goin’, fuckhead!” Logan shouted after him, but the guy didn’t even turn around. Was it really people’s personal denial keeping them from seeing all of this, or just complete selfishness?

Wes took all the news he gave him very well, but Wes had that whole British reserve thing going for him, which he assumed was something all Watchers were taught, because he knew British people who were no more reserved than anybody else (Srina, Spider, Ruby, Rags, all of Bob‘s British descendants).

The block where the Way Station was situated was strangely crowded, but mostly by the dead. Nobody appeared to be headed for the bar, they were just wandering around in a disoriented daze. Although they were mostly ghosts, an animated dead person came right up to him, making him stop short. He was a compact Hispanic man, average height, but his barrel chest and broad shouldered build made him look a bit stockier than he actually was, wearing jeans, a denim jacket, and a worn t-shirt advertising a strip club called Kinky’s. You had to look closely to see the bloodstains, which were like little rust colored spots down the front, although his bristling black hair was cut short enough that you could see the scar that left a trail running from his temple to behind his ear. He stared at Logan intently, his hazel eyes smoldering with some kind of free floating anger, and he said, “Tell me it was Camaxtli.”

Logan stared back at him in disbelief. “What?”

The man grabbed the lapels of his jacket, pulling him closer. “Damn it, Logan, tell me!  It was Camaxtli, wasn’t it?  It wasn‘t her.  There‘s no way it could have been her.”

He grabbed the man’s hands and ripped them away, but as he did, the words really sunk in. What he was saying didn’t make sense … for a stranger. But they did make sense for someone who was dead, someone who may not have died in this country, but who had definitely been touched by the supernatural in life. For someone who knew his name, and felt no compunction about reaching out and grabbing him. Logan’s gut clenched and his stomach turned to stone. Oh shit, he'd been so afraid this was going to happen.

He searched the stranger’s face for something familiar, but only saw it in the eyes, the strange eyes that seemed to know him anyway. “Scott?” he asked, already knowing the answer.